The Ice Princess
by Babyuknowme13
Summary: "Adopt a cat dude!" Finn yelled. Ice King had the seed of an idea, and it started to bloom. The Crown gave him the means. The chicks dig a family man right? It was the perfect plan! All he had to do, was be the world's best father. If he's going to have a kid, it may as well have his blood. So he rebuilds a life destroyed long ago, giving her his life's blood. Laura wakes up in Ooo
1. The Day the World Ended

Summary: It gets lonely in the Ice Kingdom, so the Ice King gets it in his head from a stray comment from Finn that he should make a family. The Crown approves. Unfortunately, the only way he knows to do this in a way Finn would approve of, is to literally _make_ one. The Crown leads him to a spell to bring the dead back to life, but to use it he needs a preserved body, his own blood, and the blood of a hero. He kidnaps Finn and Jake after getting the first two ingredients. He gets a single drop of Hero's blood, and recites the spell to bring his Ice Princess to life.

Only, he doesn't want to marry this one. Nope, she's blood of his blood after all! He just wants to raise her to take over the Ice Kingdom someday. She doesn't feel quite up to the challenge though, especially as she's now grieving the loss of her family and friends. You know the ones she knew _before_ dying in the Mushroom War?

Chapter 1: The Day The World Ended.

Laura carried her little brother, one hand clutching her younger sister, who in turn carried their baby sister as they ran for the bomb shelter. Both of the younger children were crying, screaming their fear and confusion over the dangerous world they'd been born into. Laura and Reba were old enough to know there used to be a life before the war. Laura more than Reba.

They made it just in time. Their mother hadn't. Karoline Feral had attempted to find their father, pushing her children to run ahead. Laura had known Karoline and Herald wouldn't make it, even if they found each other before the bombs dropped. They would never make it to the shelter.

Other families huddled with them, too scared to make a sound, but too tired to stay quiet. Whispers flourished as people asked the same questions they'd been asking for three years. When would the war end? Who was winning? How many of them would survive? How long until the radiation fell enough that they could go outside again?

Radiation was a big deal in WW III. Laura had been hearing and learning about it for three years. Her little brother was five, and her sister two. They didn't remember a world before the war, Carrie had never even experienced it.

Laura settled the children down, helped Reba guard their supplies from the other watchful eyes of the group they'd taken shelter with. Too many days and nights with empty bellies after leaving their things unwatched had taught them that not even the shelters were safe. They didn't save you from starvation.

They hardly protected you from radiation. They hadn't protected Carrie when she was in the womb. She'd been born with mental retardation, nothing to be done. Lots of kids born during the war had worse problems. At least she could function, as well as could be expected anyway.

She locked eyes with one man who'd been eyeing her satchel for the last half hour. His gaze moved to his wife, heavily pregnant but far too thin in the face. His clothes looked like they'd fit better on a man with more meat on his bones.

She was impressed. Impressed and depressed in equal measures actually. This man wanted to take their supplies for his wife, but he wouldn't stoop to stealing from kids and teenagers. She'd seen people murder their own relatives to avoid the extra mouths.

They were better off than some folk. The Feral family had been rural, they'd once owned a well off farm. They'd held out for a year and a half on their property when the war began, and had still kept enough money to pay for supplies when they'd been forced to evacuate from the bombs.

In their satchels and backpacks were enough food and water to keep them alive for two months, if she rationed it properly and didn't let anyone steal it. If the radiation levels fell before then, they could leave the area. She wasn't sure where they'd go, with both parents MIA she was in charge so she had to decide, but she knew there weren't many safe places left.

Rumors flew like the bullets from guns about supposed safe havens. Places underground, or so far south as to go Antarctica, if someone could make it all the way. She'd heard about plenty of them, and she'd known some of the people who'd sought them out. None of them ever came back, not that she knew of anyway. Their parents had scoffed at the idea of a safe place, and she had agreed. No place was safe from the enemy and their dirty bombs.

"Laura, mom's not coming, is she?" She sniffed and loaded her brother onto her lap. She cradled him to her chest, it was all the answer he needed. Tears fell and sobs racked his too thin body. She'd lost so much already, everyone had. She supposed that they'd been too lucky so far, they'd only lost one sibling and their grandparents. The universe wasn't satisfied with that, it had to take their parents too.

little child, be not afraid  
though rain pounds harshly against the glass  
like an unwanted stranger, there is no danger  
I am here tonight

little child, be not afraid  
though thunder explodes and lightning flash  
illuminates your tear-stained face  
I am here tonight!~

She choked. She couldn't sing the next verse. It was too much like a lie. She never made a promise she wasn't sure could be kept to a child. They didn't understand when it was broken.

little child, be not afraid  
though storm clouds mask your beloved moon  
and its candlelight beams, still keep pleasant dreams  
I am here tonight

little child, be not afraid  
though wind makes creatures of our trees  
and their branches to hands, they're not real, understand  
and I am here tonight

for you know, once even I was a  
little child, and I was afraid  
but a gentle someone always came  
to dry all my tears, trade sweet sleep for fears  
and to give a kiss goodnight

well now I am grown  
and these years have shown  
that rain's a part of how life goes  
but it's dark and it's late  
so I'll hold you and wait  
'til your frightened eyes do close!~

Others had taken up the song. It was a favorite to sing to the children when the ground shook from bombs impact and the sound of guns blasting felt a bit like thunder, out of your control. No one sang the chorus and no one dared sing the end. People had long stopped talking about what would happen after the war. All that was important was that it ends, either for the individual or for the whole.

Laura used to believe in a God, someone who set up this life and let them do as they pleased. She sometimes still believed, in the few quiet moments when they were all safe, that maybe there was a God to welcome all the dead into his kingdom. She liked the thought of mom singing with angels and dad talking baseball with Babe Ruth.

There wasn't any light in the safe house. The electric generator had been destroyed some time ago. Everyone sat in the dark, eating and whispering to each other about may haps and a someday that might never come. With her siblings asleep, and still three hours by her watch before she had to wake up Reba, Laura settled in to another long vigil.

Two weeks later saw a return to the surface, and a return to some humanity. Laura had waited until Reba woke up to talk of the man and his wife. Half their food had gone to the couple, along with good luck wishes for the soon to be born baby. Laura still felt the smile encroach on her face at the thought of it. Sometimes one had to make the good moments in life for themselves.

"Where to next?" Reba asked as they beat a hasty retreat from the dust covered town. Everyone was leaving now that the dust had settled. The radiation could still be thick in the air. This place wouldn't be fit for habitation for at least two generations, from Laura's guess.

"The enemy's on all sides, the safe zones are getting small." She reminded her. Laura needed to give her the reminder, because what she was planning would take quite a bit of persuasion on her part. It was times like these she wondered if those English classes had been worth anything, those essays she'd written seemed worse than useless now. They seemed wasteful.

"Maybe, if it's just us four, we could break through the enemy lines. They never bomb their own people." Reba was silent for a long time after that. They left the ruined town in peace, walking with some time with the married couple before they went on their own path.

"There's not much left we have to lose." Reba sighed. Laura knew when her stubborn little sister was scared. Carefully-because Jay was asleep riding piggy back and she didn't want to jostle him-she gripped Reba's free hand.

"Whatever happens, we won't lose each other. We'll be together." She promised. This at least was a promise she could keep. She refused to leave another place where family had died. If she lost her siblings tomorrow, she'd wait for a hundred years if it took that long to be buried beside them.

It was a cold comfort, one that might have those entire idealistic nut jobs who preached about 'living on' go into a tirade, but enough for them. Sometimes cold comforts were all one could offer. Laura wanted to believe that they'd all make it through this. That someday Jay could go to school and learn how to read and write, and they could get help for Carrie, and Reba wouldn't be so wishy-washy about her own life because there was a tangible _future_ waiting for her!

As for herself, Laura didn't have some idealistic ideas that so long as her siblings were happy, she would be too. All she really wanted to do was find a place where she wasn't always looking over her shoulder or listening for the click of a gun being put off its safety. If she could find a place like that, she'd be just fine living the rest of her life writing stories.

True ones, about her life in this war, pretend ones, like what she told her brother to help him sleep at night, and the Day Dream ones, where she could imagine the future that they'd have if only they could survive.

Things were quiet for a while. They were passing through an abandoned city on their way towards enemy lines. Laura bit her lip as she tried to remember how many days were left until Christmas. There wasn't anything she could really do for the holiday, but she'd at least like to keep track of the date. If for no other reason than so she could feel more like a human and less like a scavenging animal.

There was no one to activate the sirens, everything was too damaged to work. They didn't have any advanced warning when the bombs began to fall again. Laura only heard the whistle she once associated with objects falling in a cartoon. Her brows pursed together and she turned her chin upward, a horrible chill spreading through her body.

"Run!" She barked as she recognized the shadows of stealth jets and their evil cargo. Reba needed no encouragement, lacing hands together to avoid being separated. They weaved around abandoned cars and corpses littering the streets. Laura's eyes searched every sign for the bomb shelter symbol. She needed somewhere they could hide, a place that might withstand the assault.

Reba's laces, worn clean through and retied too many times to count, finally gave out. They broke and she stumbled on the loose ends. Laura felt her sister's hand drop from her grip and whirled around.

The most terrifying thing she'd ever seen had been her sisters staring up at her. Carrie too frightened to cry and Reba so empty of hope that it was clear she'd already given up. All she did now was look up at her older sister, the only one who hadn't left her behind, asking her.

Would she keep her promise?

Laura wasn't always a good person, but in the dark a person discovers who they really are. Laura felt the first impact of the bombs, normal ones this time, and she knelt beside her sister and they clutched the little ones tight, hiding their faces so they wouldn't have to watch. Reba's eyes overfilled but Laura no longer had the will for tears. All she had left was the chance to die with the remainder of her family.

Her body screamed at her to run, to find shelter, to escape the enemy and their soundless jets. She couldn't move, she only held her family tighter and apologized to her mother and father. It was December 21st 2012, that was the day the world ended.


	2. Waking Up Anyway

Chapter 2: Waking Up Anyway.

Ice King hummed thoughtfully, a strange past time for the normally careless wizard. His blue robe dress fluttered in the icy breeze as he flew towards his inner sanctum. Inside his various penguins went about their business, Gunter joined him at the entrance, following him as loyally as any servant had a right to.

The man formally known as Simon Petrikov had an idea. It wasn't an unheard of occurrence, but usually such concepts were driven towards a distant goal of companionship in marriage with an eligible princess. Not today though, today his mind whirled around with half thoughts and vague concepts that gave him a headache. Luckily his crown took care of such nuisances, sending cool thoughts of frost and snow to numb the ache.

Except today the crown also fixated on words his dear friend Finn had said. Something about adoption. The crown liked the idea for some reason, though it normally didn't interject into his habits and daily life, as late it had been positively chatty. Ice King's brows furrowed at the memory of mutterings coming from the crown late at night. Something about hair?

'_Frost only does so much. Frost melts with spring, even when spring is long time in coming.'_ He grumbled at this newest correspondence. In his room he paced the length of ice walls, unaware of a battle that had been waging for a thousand years.

'_Adopt an Heir, we know the spell.'_ Something inside him woke then, a knowledge he hadn't known he possessed. A list of things needed and the promise of a child, someone he could pass the ideas and beliefs of snow and frost to.

The first thing he needed was a body, but one specially treated by radiation. He didn't remember where the knowledge of radiation-something lost for centuries-came from. Only that the body he would require for the spell could only be found at the legendary crater.

His trip there was uneventful, though it took a full week of flight. He felt such a strong sense of foreboding as he gazed over the edge of the crater. It seemed almost to be a living thing, set to devour any life that ventured too close. Though the memory had been scrubbed from his mind centuries ago his body still remembered the horror of the thing that caused this crater. The memory of seeing the great green gas rolling over miles, encompassing the world in a matter of moments, so much larger than the ones who launched it envisioned.

Slowly, feeling less and less certain of what he was doing, he dived into the gaping maw of a beast who's birth he couldn't recall. He picked his way over the wreckage of a great world, the skeletons of buildings and vehicles, and the mutated remains of those who tried to flee.

Always the crown urged him forward, to the center of the blast where the radiation wouldn't have been able to twist the corpse beyond recognition. He found some skeletal remains that were promising, but not enough of the flesh remained for him to work with. Not until he neared the radius of the blast, where he found several of them, nearly perfect in their preservation.

For a moment he had a hard time in deciding which he wanted to take back with him. Once removed by the slowly smoldering crater they would begin to deteriorate, which meant he had to freeze them for travel.

"Which one? Which one?" He pondered, scratching the hair on his chinny chin chin. The crown had no helpful suggestions, he was on his own.

Getting bored with such dismal thoughts he closed his eyes and let fate decide. He zapped with his powers, choosing to take whichever one got hit by his ice dart. When he opened his eyes he saw the girl he'd hit.

Once, he realized distantly, she would've been almost pretty. Malnourished, with scars that marked a long and desperate flight from the nameless enemy the world had faced, but with some of her natural beauty yet intact. Although a thousand years had passed the girl's black tresses had more or less survived, grown even in the wake of the radioactive wave. Jeans and a shirt too far gone in age to read the lettering covered her body.

She held people in her arms, with her face turned upward. Her last sight would've been bombs dropping. She held two girls, one nearly her size and another much smaller. And there was a boy too, nearly hidden from view by the second oldest girl child.

His dart stuck from her hand, where it held down the head of the second oldest girl child. The three younger ones had their heads bowed, eyes clenched against their incoming doom. Only her eyes stared up unseeing, witnessing a thousand years of sky.

Slowly he knocked aside the three unnecessary bodies. Encasing the chosen one fully in ice he used his power to lift her and began another week long flight, this time in the direction of the distant Ooo.

The next ingredient was blood of his blood. Slowly he brought the ice blade to his hand, slashing across the palm quickly, leaving the sluggish blue blood to drip onto the forehead of his chosen one. It splashed onto her face, forming trails where it dripped over the sides. Slowly, her skin turned the frigid blue of his own, her hair turning white as the spell began to take effect.

"Gunter, come to daddy!" Ice King called after watching her brief transformation. The lead penguin honked in answer and waddled to his lord and master.

"Gunter honey I need you to find a suitable dress for this girl, she's going to be your new little sister!" He announced. He left the confused penguin to stare at the corpse, wondering why his new sister was cold as the grave and utterly still. Shrugging, the penguin enlisted his sister-folk to make a dress for the girl.

Next he needed a gem that could hold her soul and bring it back from whichever Dead World she resided in. That sent him to the Wizard's Town. He said the password at the hidden entrance and flew down into the streets, searching for a cursed gem shop.

Unlike his past visits he did not try to talk to the other wizards, not even to flirt with any of the witches. He simply bought a red gem with many fine points, threaded on a silver chain. It could hold the souls of the dead, which would bring his new daughter back to life, and keep her there.

The final ingredient was the trickiest. He needed the blood of a Hero. He had no idea why, and the crown was very hesitant in asking for it. His headache renewed itself when he thought of skipping the step. It mustn't be done without Hero's blood. He didn't know why, only that it was essential. That everything he'd done would fail otherwise.

Finn and Jake were in their tree fort, enjoying an afternoon of games and sweets. It had been quiet the last few weeks, with Ice King gone on some mysterious mission. They had tried to find him, thinking that he might be trying to kidnap a princess, but all their efforts were in vain.

"What the _donk_ man?" Finn cursed inside the ice prison he and Jake had been thrown into. Ice King chuckled to himself, making a tsk-tsk sound at the rude language.

"I'm just doing what you _told_ me to do Finn!" He explained. He figured he had better elaborate when he saw the look of confusion in his friend's eyes. "You said I needed to adopt, so I'm _adopting_ a _daughter!_"

"What-chu talking about Ice King?" Jake barked through the bars. He yelped as ice daggers started flying at them. With little room to dodge the Ice King soon had retrieved more than enough blood for the spell.

Finn wiped the cut on his cheek and gasped as the penguins brought in a frozen body. She had the same snowy hair as the Ice King, and the same frozen skin. An icy bow was wrapped around her neck and a long, midnight blue ballgown was draped across her frame. She stared unseeing at the sky, a look on her face as though questioning—no, _demanding_—the reason for what she was witnessing.

"Now then," Ice King dripped the crimson liquid onto her forehead, allowing it to sink into frozen skin and slowly unthaw her heart.

"Frozen in dirt  
Borne of Hurt  
Blood as my blood  
Now your heart flood  
Frosting Breath  
Saved from Death  
A Hero's Token  
Fix what was once Broken!"

At first, a lot of nothing seemed to occur. Just as Ice King seemed ready to destroy the statuesque corpse though, the ice began melting.

Finn and Jake watched in awe as slowly the girl's eyes drifted shut and breath began pouring into her chest. Coughs arose, a hand brought up to clutch the red gem around her neck as she forced air into her frozen lungs.

Laura had never expected to wake up again. She had watched those bombs fall and felt the trembling of her siblings in her two arms. Death had been a long time coming, as far as she was concerned. It had taken her grandparents, her mother and father, and now it would take the rest of the Feral family. At least now not a force in this world or any other could separate them.

She had clearly underestimated the forces of this world.

The man with the long white beard and the crown began bouncing and clapping in glee. In a prison of ice stood a boy, and what she loosely labeled a dog, or possibly a child in a dog costume. The ground beneath her hand was not ground at all, but sheer ice. _Everything_ here seemed to be made of ice!

She felt no cold. Logically she _knew_ she should be shivering, the dress that had replaced her clothes was thin enough that she clearly felt the icy floor. Not a single tremor betrayed her though, and stupidly she sat, unable to comprehend that somehow she had survived.

"Who the donk are you?" Jake finally snapped, unable to take the (relative) silence any longer. Laura took an inappropriate moment to gape at the talking dog.

"Laura Feral. Are you a talking dog?" Maybe she really was dead, and this was the afterlife. If so she felt kind of ripped off. She wasn't sure _what_ she'd been expecting but a world made of ice and talking dogs weren't one of them.

"Hi Laura, nice to meet'cha!" The old man waved at her. "I'm Ice King and you're my new Ice _Princess_!"

"Excuse me, what?" She decided to gape some more as she climbed to her feet. Her legs felt like pudding, as if she hadn't stood in a really long time. "Am I dead? Is this the afterlife? Where's my brother and sisters?" She fired off the questions, half afraid that this vision would fade before they were answered.

"Oh silly, you silly!" Ice King laughed. "You _were_ dead but now you're not, since I brought you back to life!" She chose to ignore that highly impossible statement. It was obvious the poor guy's mind had snapped. She'd seen people like him before, their mind broke and started replaying events from before the War.

"Uh-huh." She tried for an understanding sort of smile. "So, tell me mister Ice King sir, where are my siblings? A girl just a bit younger than me with brown hair, a little boy about five with blonde hair, and a two year old girl, completely bald." She described them as they stood in her mind in their last moments. It was impossible to have survived that, so logically this must be the afterlife, and logically, that meant she should be able to find them.

"Oh them, phooey!" The old man scoffed. "I left them in the Crator, I only needed _one_ body." The old man was clearly too far into his delusion to be of any use. Laura turned to the dog and the boy.

"Who are you two?" She asked, walking closer to them. Her feet were bare on the ice and she took another moment to fully appreciate how strange it was to not feel the cold.

"I'm Finn the Human, and this is my brother, Jake." The boy was wearing an odd bear-shaped hat. The dog smiled and waved, and then apparently decided that the laws of physics need not apply and changed size until he could fit between the bars.

"You're going down Ice King, and we're saving this Ice Princess!" The dog-man boasted, busting his friend from the prison.

"Wait, can someone _please_ explain—!" Her voice cut off. Until now she had simply assumed that the blue skin the old man had was simply a trick of the light, reflecting off the pillars of ice. But Finn had normal skin, and she didn't, and her hair was white when she was certain it used to be black.

In those next moments, pulled behind a boy in a white hat and riding a magical talking dog, Laura began to realize that the afterlife was much more complicated than Heaven and Hell.


End file.
